Maximising the availability and use of high-quality evidence for policymaking: collaborative, targeted and efficient evidence reviews

A number of barriers have been identified to getting evidence into policy. In particular, a lack of policy relevance and lack of timeliness have been identified as causing tension between researchers and policy makers. Rapid reviews are used increasingly as an approach to address timeliness, however, there is a lack of consensus on the most effective review methods and they do not necessarily address the need of policy makers. In the course of our work with the Scottish Government’s Review of maternity and neonatal services we developed a new approach to evidence synthesis, which this paper will describe. We developed a standardised approach to produce collaborative, targeted and efficient evidence reviews for policy making. This approach aimed to ensure the reviews were policy relevant, high quality and up-to-date, and which were presented in a consistent, transparent, and easy to access format. The approach involved the following stages: 1) establishing a review team with expertise both in the topic and in systematic reviewing, 2) clarifying the review questions with policy makers and subject experts (i.e., health professionals, service user representatives, researchers) who acted as review sponsors, 3) developing review protocols to systematically identify quantitative and qualitative review-level evidence on effectiveness, sustainability and acceptability; if review level evidence was not available, primary studies were sought, 4) agreeing a framework to structure the analysis of the reviews around a consistent set of key concepts and outcomes; in this case a published framework for maternal and newborn care was used, 5) developing an iterative process between policy makers, reviewers and review sponsors, 6) rapid searches and retrieval of literature, 7) analysis of identified literature which was mapped to the framework and included review sponsor input, 8) production of recommendations mapped to the agreed framework and presented as ‘summary topsheets’ in a consistent and easy to read format. Our approach has drawn on different components of pre-existing rapid review methodology to provide a rigorous and pragmatic approach to rapid evidence synthesis. Additionally, the use of a framework to map the evidence helped structure the review questions, expedited the analysis and provided a consistent template for recommendations, which took into account the policy context. We therefore propose that our approach (described in this paper) can be described as producing collaborative, targeted and efficient evidence reviews for policy makers.